To the extent the DIY "community" has the level of talent that it takes to do a 3/4 HP variable frequency drive, which you'd need for the better washers out there even before you got to cycle management, it's doing things like model airplane autopilots and automobile ECUs, which are a lot more fun.

You can just watch the cycles and write it down, it's boring and rather time consuming.

Hoover actually had a model with programmable cycles (you put your custom cycle on Android and upload it via an NFC tag on the washer). What you could set was very limited, but they tried, I guess.